I'm just trying to explain that that's not a good way to be popular, well liked, or a charismatic leader.
Of course it's always possible that RMS doesn't particularly want to be a popular, well liked person. He cares a great deal about Free Software, and has poured his heart and soul into it, but has never particularly shown that he cares about being liked. He appears to care about being listened to and have his ideas thought about, but he shows no sign that he particularly cares if people like him.
Personally, I'd have it no other way. The Free Software movement does need some charismatic leaders, but it also needs some uncompromising zealots who will stick to their guns in the face of hostility. RMS has shown that he has the vision to see possible problems facing Free Software and the determination not to back down in his defense of those principles. It's unfortunate that those characteristics make him tough to get along with, but Free Software would have foundered long ago without RMS's unwillingness to bend.
But I am fully confident that our elected leaders will know how to address those issues.
Yes, they've clearly shown that they know how to address this issue: they allow the practice to continue so that there will be lucrative job offers available in case they don't win the next election. You didn't really expect them to close down what amounts to a full employment program for out of work politicians, did you?
Ammendments are not "less authoritative" than the rest of the Constution; they are, legally, exactly the same thing.
If anything, the Ammendments are more authoritative than the main body. An ammendment is something that's been added later, in many cases to correct a flaw or omission in the original body of the Constitution. Thus if an Ammendment is in conflict with something in the main body, the Ammendment takes precidence. The obvious example is the Twelfth Ammendment, which changed to process of how the President and Vice President are elected. Today we follow the procedure outlined in the Ammendment (with a few additional changes made by even later Ammendments) rather than the one outlined in the main body.
To take it to an extreme, they might as well have said "because someone can stalk you, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy wherever you go."
But that's not legally true. The issue is not whether it's possible for somebody to determine the information, but whether you have a reasonable expectation of privacy. For instance, it's illegal for somebody to break into my home and watch to see if I engage in kinky sex acts, and in most places there are peeping tom laws that say it's also illegal for them to watch through a window. That means that I have a legal expectation of privacy about what I do in my own bedroom; finding out requires an illegal act. Similarly, there are laws preventing many uses of my Social Security Number, and preventing people who have legal access to it from spreading it around willy-nilly. Therefore I have a reasonable expectation of privacy in my SSN, and the court ruled so in this case.
Commuting is a different matter. As long as I have to use public roads to get to work, my actions are clearly on public display. I have no reason to believe that people aren't watching everything I do. In fact, in many public places people are strictly forbidden from doing things that they would be perfectly free to do at home specifically because it's understood that people are likely to be watching. If I want to have kinky sex in my car on the way to work, not only do I not have any reason to expect other people not to watch, the law says that I can be fined or thrown in jail because they're likely to. Thus I have no legal expectation of privacy there.
Well, since the killer in this case killed himself immediately after shooting the victim, there's a rather limited list of options for what the law can do to him. I'm assuming that the victim's heirs are free to sue his estate for wrongful death, but that's about it. It does seem reasonable, though, that the information broker- who was essentially an accomplice to the murder- should be held liable in some way.
Actually, the court ruled in a similar matter as part of this case. They ruled that information that can readily be found out by observation of public actions is not covered under privacy laws. The specific example in this case was the victim's work address; the Court ruled that since somebody could easily and legally watch you commute from home to work, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in your work address. The same thing is undoubtedly true of your home address, license plate number, and any number of similar facets of your life.
The labels don't own the copyright in perpetuity. IIRC, the record labels usually get a deal where they have exclusive rights to a recording for some time, like 30 years, but the copyright on both the music and the specific recording still belong to the writer and performer, respectively. Thus the labels don't have the right to give the recording away, even though they have the power to ensure that it stays out of print until their original contract rights for it expire. There was actually a big stink on this topic a few years ago when the record companies tried to have albums legally declared to be "works for hire", which would have legally transfered all rights to the labels, rather than just giving them temporary exclusive rights to publish the work.
Another thing, how long will these CD-R's last? It seems ironic that the Smithsonian Institution is selling media that will likely not last very long.
The quoted lifespan of a good quality CD-R is 100 years. I'm always suspicious of number like that, since they obviously haven't had a chance to leave one sitting around for that long, but they are supposed to be one of the best digital media in terms of lifespan. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the discs lasted long enough that they were still good long after it was no longer possible to buy a player that could understand them.
Why exactly is pressing a CD more costly than burning one? And what is the cost difference?
Pressing a CD has an initial setup cost associated with making the master, getting the mold set up, etc. It's apparently not that expensive, but it is several hundred dollars just to start a run. the first duplicator I looked up will make 300 disks for $720, 1000 for $885, and 5000 for $2785, so you can see that the cost of one extra disk is a lot less than the cost of getting the first disk made. That looks as though it's something like $0.45 per disk, but with a setup fee of close to $600 just to get the first disk off the press. So if you assume that it costs $0.50 for a blank CD-R and $3 in labor and overhead to burn one, it'll be cheaper to make lots up to about 200 using CD-R than pressing them.
What really gets me, though, is that the marketing departments think that that's how it should work. They just cannot fathom a world where you just do what you say and say what you do. It's too simple or something.
Perhaps it's insufficiently self-serving. Just think about it. What keeps those marketing people employed? It's the perception that you need hordes of spin doctors to take inconvenient facts and make them sound favorable, or to take slightly good news and turn it into the greatest thing ever. If all that's needed to maintain your reputation is telling the truth and offering good services, then the Marketing department is largely a waste and most of the people there will be out of their jobs.
So in many ways, my reputation is better then yours. Nya nya!
Obviously the number of fans, or user number, or karma are insufficient. What we need is a google-like system in which each user's cool factor is recursively defined by the number of fans, user number, karma, and cool factor of that user's fans. So having CmdrTaco as a fan gives you a bigger boost than having a raw newbie as a fan.
Hell, Apple made people pay for a point release (Jaguar) - and Mac fans willingly do so.
Microsoft does the same thing. They charge people for point releases like 98SE and ME. You could also plausibly argue that XP is really just a point release of 2000. It's just that Microsoft isn't honest enough to admit in many cases that its "new" version of Windows is really just a point release, rather than a whole new version.
There should be such a thing as forgivness. 20 years ago, IBM was as much of a monopolist as Microsoft is today. They engaged in all of the kinds of nefarious business practices that everyone criticizes MS for now, and if anything they had even more of a stranglehold on the industry. Today, at least in part because they lost their anti-trust action and found it so painful that they never want to go there again, IBM is a good citizen that has many people's respect and trust. Give Microsoft the same kind of experience, and they may be in the same position in 20 years.
This is why I set up my email to load images only from people in my address book. Nobody else is likely to send me a HTML mail that's particularly interesting, and it only takes a second to load the images in case they do. Of course that requires that your email program have that as an option.
That way, if kids are caught bypassing the censorware with a password, we can find out which user lost/lent his card to the wrong set of kids.
Who says that it's the "wrong set" of kids? Some parents may trust their children more than others, or they may give their kids the password because the site the kids need to access for their school report is blocked by a ridiculous censor. (The need to get around censorware isn't something that's made up, you know. As an example, my work uses a censorware package that blocks access to some sites related to breast cancer. That might be OK in an office, but it's a big problem for us because we're a cancer hospital with a research institute.)
If you want a real and reasonable solution, a better approach would be to require each computer user to log on using his library card. Parents could be given the right to choose what level of censorship they wanted applied to their kids- even to the point of not letting their kids onto the net at all. If you wanted, you could even let parents ask for information about their child's browsing habits. I'd probably have the system set up so that parents were automatically sent a list of sites their child had visited (if that's what they wanted) and then wipe the record so that nobody except for the parent would have access.
A die-hard Republican free-marketeer, he aims to do so with as little government intrusion as possible.
Unfortunately, I'm not so sure that this is true in the way you think. There are a lot of "diehard free-marketeers" who don't see excessively strong copyright as being a form of government intrusion. Many of them, in fact, see strong copyright as a preservation of property rights, which they veiw as being the cornerstone of a market economy. If anything, the idea of limiting government intrusion is likely to come out in the form of explicitly allowing copyright holders to hack the systems of alleged thieves, or some similar vigilante-style action.
Now it just makes it sound like a group of 16 year old HS students.
Perhaps that's not so unreasonable. The culprits are 19 and 21, and they might well have been members of the group since they were in HS. When you think about it, releasing a worm like that doesn't suggest a level of sophistication and respect for others that we think of as typical of a responsible adult. It's the act of a childish vandal, so it's not terribly surprising to find that it was done by a bunch of jerks who are part of a group that sounds like a bunch of highschool students.
No, no, NO! A web site that is properly designed and standards compliant can send exactly the same web page to IE and Lynx and have it render properly in each. That's a major point of the HTML 4 standard. Of course that standard compliance includes things like including ALT tags in images and providing regular links in addition to image maps, which some people seem strangely reluctant to do. But if you actually follow the standard, you can make pages that look good in graphical browsers and are still useable in text-only browsers.
How can you mention Fine Wine in reference to the Simpsons and not mention all-time great episode "The Crepes of Wrath"? It has Bart saved only after mentioning the bad guys putting antifreeze in the wine, and an Albanian child spy trying to get secret information from Homer about the power plant. Absolutely hilarious
One scary though was the comment that most of the previous fast propagating worms are latency limited, since they have to wait for a response from each scan they attempt. They speed things up by spawning multiple threads, but that's inefficient. Sapphire/Slammer got around that by being small enough to fit into a single packet(!) so that it didn't have to wait for a return message, but that small size sharply limited its possible payload. I'm sort of worried about a worm using advanced techniques such as scanrand. As mentioned in a previous slashdot article, it was able to scan an entire class B network in just 4 seconds. With that kind of performance, you could have a similar speed of spread even with a large, sophisticated, and malicious worm.
There is such a thing as multiple discovery. The reason that Columbus is given credit for discovering the New World is because his discovery was the historically significant one. The response to previous discoveries of America was minor and historically unimportant; none of those other travelers started significant, long lasting communication between the New and Old World. That's why Columbus was able to re-discover it independently. The previous discoverers' knowledge quickly died out. Columbus's voyage, OTOH, quickly lead to large scale trips between Europe and America, so that the two of them became socially, politically, and economically tied together. After Columbus, you couldn't discover America again because knowledge of it was too widespread for it to count as a discovery.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it's always possible that RMS doesn't particularly want to be a popular, well liked person. He cares a great deal about Free Software, and has poured his heart and soul into it, but has never particularly shown that he cares about being liked. He appears to care about being listened to and have his ideas thought about, but he shows no sign that he particularly cares if people like him.
Personally, I'd have it no other way. The Free Software movement does need some charismatic leaders, but it also needs some uncompromising zealots who will stick to their guns in the face of hostility. RMS has shown that he has the vision to see possible problems facing Free Software and the determination not to back down in his defense of those principles. It's unfortunate that those characteristics make him tough to get along with, but Free Software would have foundered long ago without RMS's unwillingness to bend.
Yes, they've clearly shown that they know how to address this issue: they allow the practice to continue so that there will be lucrative job offers available in case they don't win the next election. You didn't really expect them to close down what amounts to a full employment program for out of work politicians, did you?
If anything, the Ammendments are more authoritative than the main body. An ammendment is something that's been added later, in many cases to correct a flaw or omission in the original body of the Constitution. Thus if an Ammendment is in conflict with something in the main body, the Ammendment takes precidence. The obvious example is the Twelfth Ammendment, which changed to process of how the President and Vice President are elected. Today we follow the procedure outlined in the Ammendment (with a few additional changes made by even later Ammendments) rather than the one outlined in the main body.
But that's not legally true. The issue is not whether it's possible for somebody to determine the information, but whether you have a reasonable expectation of privacy. For instance, it's illegal for somebody to break into my home and watch to see if I engage in kinky sex acts, and in most places there are peeping tom laws that say it's also illegal for them to watch through a window. That means that I have a legal expectation of privacy about what I do in my own bedroom; finding out requires an illegal act. Similarly, there are laws preventing many uses of my Social Security Number, and preventing people who have legal access to it from spreading it around willy-nilly. Therefore I have a reasonable expectation of privacy in my SSN, and the court ruled so in this case.
Commuting is a different matter. As long as I have to use public roads to get to work, my actions are clearly on public display. I have no reason to believe that people aren't watching everything I do. In fact, in many public places people are strictly forbidden from doing things that they would be perfectly free to do at home specifically because it's understood that people are likely to be watching. If I want to have kinky sex in my car on the way to work, not only do I not have any reason to expect other people not to watch, the law says that I can be fined or thrown in jail because they're likely to. Thus I have no legal expectation of privacy there.
Well, since the killer in this case killed himself immediately after shooting the victim, there's a rather limited list of options for what the law can do to him. I'm assuming that the victim's heirs are free to sue his estate for wrongful death, but that's about it. It does seem reasonable, though, that the information broker- who was essentially an accomplice to the murder- should be held liable in some way.
Actually, the court ruled in a similar matter as part of this case. They ruled that information that can readily be found out by observation of public actions is not covered under privacy laws. The specific example in this case was the victim's work address; the Court ruled that since somebody could easily and legally watch you commute from home to work, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in your work address. The same thing is undoubtedly true of your home address, license plate number, and any number of similar facets of your life.
The labels don't own the copyright in perpetuity. IIRC, the record labels usually get a deal where they have exclusive rights to a recording for some time, like 30 years, but the copyright on both the music and the specific recording still belong to the writer and performer, respectively. Thus the labels don't have the right to give the recording away, even though they have the power to ensure that it stays out of print until their original contract rights for it expire. There was actually a big stink on this topic a few years ago when the record companies tried to have albums legally declared to be "works for hire", which would have legally transfered all rights to the labels, rather than just giving them temporary exclusive rights to publish the work.
The quoted lifespan of a good quality CD-R is 100 years. I'm always suspicious of number like that, since they obviously haven't had a chance to leave one sitting around for that long, but they are supposed to be one of the best digital media in terms of lifespan. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the discs lasted long enough that they were still good long after it was no longer possible to buy a player that could understand them.
Pressing a CD has an initial setup cost associated with making the master, getting the mold set up, etc. It's apparently not that expensive, but it is several hundred dollars just to start a run. the first duplicator I looked up will make 300 disks for $720, 1000 for $885, and 5000 for $2785, so you can see that the cost of one extra disk is a lot less than the cost of getting the first disk made. That looks as though it's something like $0.45 per disk, but with a setup fee of close to $600 just to get the first disk off the press. So if you assume that it costs $0.50 for a blank CD-R and $3 in labor and overhead to burn one, it'll be cheaper to make lots up to about 200 using CD-R than pressing them.
Perhaps it's insufficiently self-serving. Just think about it. What keeps those marketing people employed? It's the perception that you need hordes of spin doctors to take inconvenient facts and make them sound favorable, or to take slightly good news and turn it into the greatest thing ever. If all that's needed to maintain your reputation is telling the truth and offering good services, then the Marketing department is largely a waste and most of the people there will be out of their jobs.
Obviously the number of fans, or user number, or karma are insufficient. What we need is a google-like system in which each user's cool factor is recursively defined by the number of fans, user number, karma, and cool factor of that user's fans. So having CmdrTaco as a fan gives you a bigger boost than having a raw newbie as a fan.
Microsoft does the same thing. They charge people for point releases like 98SE and ME. You could also plausibly argue that XP is really just a point release of 2000. It's just that Microsoft isn't honest enough to admit in many cases that its "new" version of Windows is really just a point release, rather than a whole new version.
There should be such a thing as forgivness. 20 years ago, IBM was as much of a monopolist as Microsoft is today. They engaged in all of the kinds of nefarious business practices that everyone criticizes MS for now, and if anything they had even more of a stranglehold on the industry. Today, at least in part because they lost their anti-trust action and found it so painful that they never want to go there again, IBM is a good citizen that has many people's respect and trust. Give Microsoft the same kind of experience, and they may be in the same position in 20 years.
Yes, and so did I. It just took the editors a couple of days to get around to putting it up.
This is why I set up my email to load images only from people in my address book. Nobody else is likely to send me a HTML mail that's particularly interesting, and it only takes a second to load the images in case they do. Of course that requires that your email program have that as an option.
Who says that it's the "wrong set" of kids? Some parents may trust their children more than others, or they may give their kids the password because the site the kids need to access for their school report is blocked by a ridiculous censor. (The need to get around censorware isn't something that's made up, you know. As an example, my work uses a censorware package that blocks access to some sites related to breast cancer. That might be OK in an office, but it's a big problem for us because we're a cancer hospital with a research institute.)
If you want a real and reasonable solution, a better approach would be to require each computer user to log on using his library card. Parents could be given the right to choose what level of censorship they wanted applied to their kids- even to the point of not letting their kids onto the net at all. If you wanted, you could even let parents ask for information about their child's browsing habits. I'd probably have the system set up so that parents were automatically sent a list of sites their child had visited (if that's what they wanted) and then wipe the record so that nobody except for the parent would have access.
Unfortunately, I'm not so sure that this is true in the way you think. There are a lot of "diehard free-marketeers" who don't see excessively strong copyright as being a form of government intrusion. Many of them, in fact, see strong copyright as a preservation of property rights, which they veiw as being the cornerstone of a market economy. If anything, the idea of limiting government intrusion is likely to come out in the form of explicitly allowing copyright holders to hack the systems of alleged thieves, or some similar vigilante-style action.
Perhaps that's not so unreasonable. The culprits are 19 and 21, and they might well have been members of the group since they were in HS. When you think about it, releasing a worm like that doesn't suggest a level of sophistication and respect for others that we think of as typical of a responsible adult. It's the act of a childish vandal, so it's not terribly surprising to find that it was done by a bunch of jerks who are part of a group that sounds like a bunch of highschool students.
No, no, NO! A web site that is properly designed and standards compliant can send exactly the same web page to IE and Lynx and have it render properly in each. That's a major point of the HTML 4 standard. Of course that standard compliance includes things like including ALT tags in images and providing regular links in addition to image maps, which some people seem strangely reluctant to do. But if you actually follow the standard, you can make pages that look good in graphical browsers and are still useable in text-only browsers.
How can you mention Fine Wine in reference to the Simpsons and not mention all-time great episode "The Crepes of Wrath"? It has Bart saved only after mentioning the bad guys putting antifreeze in the wine, and an Albanian child spy trying to get secret information from Homer about the power plant. Absolutely hilarious
"Now pay for your purchase and get out!"
"And come again."
One scary though was the comment that most of the previous fast propagating worms are latency limited, since they have to wait for a response from each scan they attempt. They speed things up by spawning multiple threads, but that's inefficient. Sapphire/Slammer got around that by being small enough to fit into a single packet(!) so that it didn't have to wait for a return message, but that small size sharply limited its possible payload. I'm sort of worried about a worm using advanced techniques such as scanrand. As mentioned in a previous slashdot article, it was able to scan an entire class B network in just 4 seconds. With that kind of performance, you could have a similar speed of spread even with a large, sophisticated, and malicious worm.
Sorry, they already have that. Oh, wait. I thought you said WinBS O D. Sorry.
That's not a devil. That's a daemon.
There is such a thing as multiple discovery. The reason that Columbus is given credit for discovering the New World is because his discovery was the historically significant one. The response to previous discoveries of America was minor and historically unimportant; none of those other travelers started significant, long lasting communication between the New and Old World. That's why Columbus was able to re-discover it independently. The previous discoverers' knowledge quickly died out. Columbus's voyage, OTOH, quickly lead to large scale trips between Europe and America, so that the two of them became socially, politically, and economically tied together. After Columbus, you couldn't discover America again because knowledge of it was too widespread for it to count as a discovery.